What goes on behind the scenes?
When it comes to online marketing there is a significant amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to ensure success in terms of search engine position, which is the key to site traffic. Many people assume, incorrectly, that it’s all about link building, social media and flashy graphics.
What most people don’t realise is that behind the scenes, at a code level, there is a lot going on. Let’s break down some of the basic elements.
Meta data: This is the information in the code which search engines use to deliver sites to searchers.
It includes the ‘title’ of the page (the text that appears in the top strip on your browser) and the ‘description’ which isn’t visible on the site itself, but search engines use when delivering search results.
There is also a set of meta ‘keywords’ but these, if not correctly implemented, actually act as a barrier, so it is often safer to leave these out rather than risk the wrath of Google.
These ‘meta’ elements should contain the keywords you wish the site to be found for. It is vital this part of search engine optimisation is carried out correctly. Done right, it will help you up the rankings. Done badly, the site will sink beyond trace. It is also important to understand that these elements can be tweaked periodically to make sure that the site continues to perform as expected.
Something else we put in the back end of the site is the tracking code. This is a unique snippet of code which allows the analytics program to collect info on the site. Without this, no one would know how the site was used and how many people visit it. We use two different analytics programs, Google Analytics, which is a very useful tool, and Yahoo Indextools, which although not as user friendly, has much more data available.
There are a raft of other technical aspects to online marketing that take place, dependent on the type of site. Dynamic URL structures which are search engine friendly, dynamic meta data which changes automatically to suit the page the user is looking at, redirects which are put in place so that search engines spider a site correctly and web page ‘zipping’ which compresses a page to make it faster to load are just some of the back end ‘magic tricks’ that take place.
Our approach of making sure that marketing works hand in hand with technical from the outset means that a Slightly Different website enters the world with the best possible chance of success.
